Jump to content

User:Deathsythe/Malamanteau

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

On May 12th, 2010, xkcd featured a new comic named Malamanteau, showing a fictional Wikipedia-article named the same. The word malamanteau is itself a portmanteau and a malapropism, that is, it is a neologism created by combining two words in sound and meaning. Yet the word doesn't actually have a meaning in the English language.

Within a few hours the article was created on several Wikimedia-projects, including Wikipedia in various languages[1] [2] and Wiktionary[3]. Since malamanteau is purely artificial and does not have any occurrences other than xkcd prior to May 12th it was rejected by Wikipedian Administrators - debate still taking place.

Malamanteau has made it's way into several blogs and articles[4] [5], primarily because of its sudden impact on Wikipedia and the internet. For some hours during May 12th and 13th it was one of the most popular search terms on Google[citation needed].

Appears to have been coined at Metafilter in 2007: http://ask.metafilter.com/67192/How-to-define-this-language-mistake htom (talk) 23:32, 14 May 2010 (UTC)